His 2018 electoral campaign against the leftist Workers’ Party (WP) used WhatsApp to great effect, and mostly succeeded because the conservative Brazilian judiciary engineered the imprisonment of legendary WP leader Lula Di Silva taking him out of the electoral game. Bolsonaro had served for 22 years as a federal deputy representing Rio di Janiero State and was known for his ideology of ‘national conservatism’ which privileged liberal ‘free market’ solutions and a foreign policy tilt towards the US and Israel. During the presidential campaign he was the victim of a lone wolf knife attack of debatable seriousness. Or perhaps the beneficiary: the incident amplified his reputation as an outsider fighting against entrenched elites who would use any means to defeat him.
As President his list of failures and missteps beggars belief, with Covid-denial and encouraging the destruction of the Amazonian rainforests top of the pile. It’s as if Bolsonaro is deeply committed to the destruction of his own species. The Brazilian senate certainly thought so. It launched an investigation into Bolsonaro for downplaying ‘the little flu’ (Covid-19) and resisting vaccinations, resulting in a crippled healthcare system and 600,000 dead Brazilians. Throughout the pandemic he pranced around maskless (he caught a mild case) and promoted so many anti-science myths that YouTube found it necessary to yank 15 of his Covid-related videos from the web. By the spring of 2020 Brazil had lost two health ministers, the last quitting in frustration after only a month.
